The iPad may soon have competition in the education sector

Amplify released a video with a product demonstration of its upcoming Android tablet aimed toward education.

Joel Klein, former Chancellor of the NYC Department of Education and now head of News Corporation's Amplify education unit, announced today at the South by Southwest Education conference in Austin, Texas that the company will release an Android tablet catered to the classroom. "The last thing we need is another pile of used laptops at the back of the classroom," Klein told Fast Company. He added that the new Amplify tablet will be a "fully integrated teaching and learning solution."

The tablet will come with Google Apps for Education; audio, video, games, and online text books provided by Common Sense Media (according to its official site, the organization is "dedicated to improving the lives of kids and families"); a built-in dictionary from Merriam-Webster; and a graphing calculator. The device will also feature specialized search tools so that students can find digital lessons and homework related to what they learn at school, with all of the content following the guidelines of the Common Core educational standard that has been adopted by most school systems around the country. Additionally, the tablets will feature apps and tools for educators and school officials. Amplify hopes to leave the tablet "open" to allow students to access non-native content and to entice developers to create applications for it. Apple's iPad currently holds the top spot in learning-geared apps, with roughly 20,000 educational apps available in the iTunes App Store.

Little detail has been provided regarding the specifications in Amplify's Android tablets, but they'll cost about $299 for the Wi-Fi only model and require a $99-per-year subscription for access to the education content for two years. Amplify will also offer a $349 4G-capable version of the tablet with a $179-per-year contract.

The New York Timesreports that the company is hoping school districts use grants from the Education Department's Race to the Top program to help pay for the devices.

iPads are absolutely atrocious in educational settings, mainly due to their "single-user" configuration. It's impossible to share a single iPad between multiple classes of students without having data trampled over by other users. They're also a royal pain to get data onto and off of, and to integrate into local network infrastructure for file/print. They really are nothing but glorified ereaders and board game replacements, and it boggles my mind that schools trip over themselves to buy these things ... and then regret it 3 months later.

Android tablets prior to 4.2 weren't much better, although you at least had better access to the data on the things. At least with Android 4.2 there's now multi-user support so each student gets their own account, their own data storage, their own apps, their own e-mail, etc.

Genuine question:Why does someone need to buy this particular tablet rather than getting a Nexus and loading the apps onto that? Whats the advantages/disadvantages?

From what it the video demonstrated, being able to just take one out of the box, scan the QR code and be instantly ready to go is a pretty big selling point for a very understaffed school IT department and teaching staff of widely varying technical aptitude. The price for the listed specs (http://www.amplify.com/tablet/#amplify-specs) isn't too bad either compared to shelling out ~$479 for an iPad. As long as this also ties in well with the existing student information systems, and isn't saddled with an underwhelming amount of storage, it should do very well in K-12 environments.

iPads are absolutely atrocious in educational settings, mainly due to their "single-user" configuration. It's impossible to share a single iPad between multiple classes of students without having data trampled over by other users. They're also a royal pain to get data onto and off of, and to integrate into local network infrastructure for file/print. They really are nothing but glorified ereaders and board game replacements, and it boggles my mind that schools trip over themselves to buy these things ... and then regret it 3 months later.

Android tablets prior to 4.2 weren't much better, although you at least had better access to the data on the things. At least with Android 4.2 there's now multi-user support so each student gets their own account, their own data storage, their own apps, their own e-mail, etc.

I don't doubt your conclusions, it is probably like you say. But I'd like to ask you why it is like that?

For example: Why should users switch devices between classes? Where I am classes are not silos and they sometimes share resources and sometimes even use the same locale.

Have you tried setting them up using iOS deployment (the iPhone/iOS Configurator)? From what I can tell it is built for people like you. But perhaps something is missing?

Realistically, the only tablet which makes sense in education is Surface Pro (w/ type cover) despite perceived weaknesses. As far as cost, it's marginally more cost than even the education discount iPad once you include maintenance and administrative costs and the usual excesses in government and educational spending.

The Galaxy Note 10.1 is a close second, but besides S-Note, doesn't have the backing to get a customized environment appropriate to education. It also has the disadvantages Android devices largely share with iOS noted below.

And, yep, as others have mentioned, the iPad is trash in the classroom. Why even give a student a computing device which can't properly open normal Office documents, much less edit them, or interface with a projector or external monitor without expensive new equipment. DisplayPort has the advantage of VGA adapters at least being common. HDMI adoption has been very slow in academia and schools.

Edit:Keep the down votes coming. I rather be right and hated than side with ignorance, a distinct inability to examine use cases, and putting closed ecosystems in schools.

I can't help but feel that if they were serious about actually helping everyone, this wouldn't be yet another tablet. It'd be a software suite that provided all the texts a student would require for $99 a year (negotiated with the states/schools to show the benefits to them as well), along with the same homework/dictionary/calculator thrown in. It wouldn't require specialised hardware, it would simply run on whatever tablet, phone or laptop a student wanted to use (shelling out $300 everytime a student loses a tablet would get painful quickly. Being able to replace it with a cheap Android tablet or laptop off craigslist would be better for parents).

As it stands, once these tablets become out of date, or someone else starts offering a better software suite, or the government introduces their own, won't these just be a pile of tablets at the back of the classroom instead of laptops?

So what's the association with Fox News (aka News Corp)? The only mention I see is the sub-tagline. You can't teach children effectively if your entire company is based around falsifying news items. Well, you could teach them to be garden verity racists I suppose (aka conservatives) but nothing useful.

I'll go with E because I believe all of the above is crap, along with what else comes out of those people's mouths. Except for CO2. That feeds plants. I like plants. They don't spew hate, paranoia, and fear. Just oxygen and food for me.

EDIT: Probably should have stated this is sarcasm. I don't care for Faux News one bit.

Meanwhile the products they offer don't help much and their main purpose is to enrich the companies selling them.

Whichever wins, the children and education itself loses.

Education only loses if News Corp. wins. If they had their way, we'd watch TBN and that channel that "The 700 Club" is on all day every day.

If you don't know what those are, I basically stated that they want us all to be like them. Not all Christians are bad, just the ones who spread hate and state they live a good life. You know, the ones like the Westboro Baptists.

iPads are absolutely atrocious in educational settings, mainly due to their "single-user" configuration. It's impossible to share a single iPad between multiple classes of students without having data trampled over by other users. They're also a royal pain to get data onto and off of, and to integrate into local network infrastructure for file/print. They really are nothing but glorified ereaders and board game replacements, and it boggles my mind that schools trip over themselves to buy these things ... and then regret it 3 months later.

Android tablets prior to 4.2 weren't much better, although you at least had better access to the data on the things. At least with Android 4.2 there's now multi-user support so each student gets their own account, their own data storage, their own apps, their own e-mail, etc.

People fail to realize how good the multi-user support for iPads in education is. Apple Configurator allows you to check out an iPad with custom apps and documents for each user and than check them back in and share them with another user. It is these tools that set iPad apart from Android in this area, and the biggest hurdle that Google (and their OEMs) needs to overcome if they want sell into this space.

This is just a pathetic mix of Rupert Murdoch's naked Steve Jobs envy mixed with his latent guilt about turning the nation's political discourse into a three-ringed circus. This has been coming on for a while too:

I'm at a real loss to explain the constant, feverish push for more technology in the classroom. While it offers some improvements in education, it hardly seems to be the quantum leap that its proponents would have you think it's going to be.

Some background - I attended elementary school during the era of the chalkboard, film projector, overhead projector (with transparencies) and computer-on-a-cart that was wheeled between classrooms (played a bit of Oregon Trail on those). In middle school, there were computer labs with arcane novell networking for network storage and printing. In high school, the same computer labs, TV's showing video, graphing calculators, and hushed discussions about this thing known as the internet were the bleeding edge. It wasn't until I decided to attend university some time later that computer labs had been relegated to utility research/workstation functions, presentations were being done on projectors in classrooms, and data connectivity had become fairly seamless/ubiquitous for student and instructor alike.

I see technology as nibbling around the edges of illustrating concepts to those that don't grasp them at first, but by no means can it infuse the knowledge into students. Students have to wrestle the material and instructors have to work around stumbling blocks. While decidedly unsexy, things like photocopiers, hardbound books, chalkboards, and notepads are still around because they work in education. All too often I see technology simply shifting cost and complexity around without offering an apparent benefit.

Why even give a student a computing device which can't properly open normal Office documents, much less edit them, or interface with a projector or external monitor without expensive new equipment.

Because its the only platform with all the most software in common that the teachers want to use in their classrooms.

The backlog of educational material which is web based and requires either Flash or Java (not just JavaScript) is probably an order of magnitude greater than the amount of educational material in the AppStore.

Now how about we start including Win32 / x86 apps... iOS has a small minority by comparison, you're just incredibly ignorant of the reality because no one is holding your hand and telling you what's out there.

The only thing Apple has on iOS is textbooks through iBook, which is just a second stage in their very deliberate attempt to build an e-book monopoly. The textbooks need to be available on every platform without exception or loss of features as a matter of ethics.

The only thing Apple has on iOS is textbooks through iBook, which is just a second stage in their very deliberate attempt to build an e-book monopoly. The textbooks need to be available on every platform without exception or loss of features as a matter of ethics.

If every feature of every book needs to be available on every platform at launch time, there's no way to innovate. However, there's nothing stopping authors who use iBooks Author to make textbooks for iPad from taking their content and rebuilding it for some other platform.

...a child's life ruined for not getting her a brand a stranger wanted instead of what she wanted.what a shame.

Why do you keep hammering on this? Spoiling a kid with gratuitous expensive toys, just because her friends have them, and caving to her tantrums, is bad parenting, period.

Just leave it there.

Take a look at my cousin. I'll give you a good example: My grandmother, my cousins, and me were at the museum one day and he (I think he was 11 at the time) seen a $40 Titanic build-it-yourself set. My grandmother and me tried to get him to buy the $5 version (my grandmother and me both didn't have a lot of money growing up, but my cousins did), but he was insistent, so we bought it for him. Later, we found out the $200 that his mother gave my grandmother was her payment for the week and the blank check she left was for expenditures, so we pretty much went unpaid.

Lesson 1: Giving a kid everything he/she wants can only lead to trouble.Lesson 2: WE COULD'VE BEEN IN JAMAICA!

The only thing Apple has on iOS is textbooks through iBook, which is just a second stage in their very deliberate attempt to build an e-book monopoly. The textbooks need to be available on every platform without exception or loss of features as a matter of ethics.

If every feature of every book needs to be available on every platform at launch time, there's no way to innovate. However, there's nothing stopping authors who use iBooks Author to make textbooks for iPad from taking their content and rebuilding it for some other platform.

As I recall, iBooks e-book are exactly epub format in an encrypted, DRM wrapper. Apple is giving iBooks away free to try to build a monopoly with a nice content authoring system and lock in.

No commercial publisher will have any issue affording equivalent quality authoring tools which can export to multiple formats and storefronts. Again there is an ethical issue with the seals Apple has with publishers if those books aren't for sale on other platforms.

Apple and their fans keep using those terms, innovate and invent. Those words, I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

People fail to realize how good the multi-user support for iPads in education is. Apple Configurator allows you to check out an iPad with custom apps and documents for each user and than check them back in and share them with another user. It is these tools that set iPad apart from Android in this area, and the biggest hurdle that Google (and their OEMs) needs to overcome if they want sell into this space.

Unless I've been misled, Apple Configurator only runs on OSX, and the iThing needs to be connected to the management station via USB, does it not?

So, if you are IT for a school division that is all Windows (not uncommon), now you get the added expense of a macbook/imac management station at each site (minimum) and then the headache of having to educate school staff on how to use it (unless you somehow have enough $ to have IT full time at each school site).

Far less headache to treat them as single user devices.

Much less headache in the classroom using something like tabpilot (pushes config via wifi from a nifty web interface) on android.

Realistically, the only tablet which makes sense in education is Surface Pro (w/ type cover) despite perceived weaknesses. As far as cost, it's marginally more cost than even the education discount iPad once you include maintenance and administrative costs and the usual excesses in government and educational spending.

(Snip)

And, yep, as others have mentioned, the iPad is trash in the classroom. Why even give a student a computing device which can't properly open normal Office documents, much less edit them, or interface with a projector or external monitor without expensive new equipment. DisplayPort has the advantage of VGA adapters at least being common. HDMI adoption has been very slow in academia and schools.

I doubt stringent MS Office compatibility is a big requirement for the students to write reports or make presentations for the class.

Meanwhile, iPad already has tons of education apps optimized and ready for download at App Store. I'm sure there are lots of Windows edication apps out there, too, but I don't think the level of optimization to Surface Pro's format is just there.

Even if the keyboard was 100 bucks, MS would have to give more than 30% discount from the base price, and we haven't considered Apple's side of the bid.

Or, the difference has to be made up with "maintenance and administration costs". The thing is, though, iPad is more of an appliance and there are pretty nice tools for administering them (see Sifaka's comment). I'm not sure the TCO would be $300+/unit worse than a Windows 8 computer.

Come to think of it, getting Surface Pros is just getting laptops like the old way. Only difference is that the screen is detachable and is a touch screen.

And the "expensive new equipment" for iPad? The Lightning-to-HDMI adapter is $49. AppleTV for wirelessly streaming the screen is $99. You only need one for each projector, so that's like one to two for the whole classroom. This will not make much of a dent in the overall costs. I mean, "usual excesses in government and educational spending" and all that considered.

I'd personally opt for Apple TV because it would be good in terms of maintenance... You know, no frayed wires from kids pulling them.

In short, I just don't see the apparent advantage of MS Surface Pro in the classroom as opposed to iPad - cost or apps wise.

The only thing Apple has on iOS is textbooks through iBook, which is just a second stage in their very deliberate attempt to build an e-book monopoly. The textbooks need to be available on every platform without exception or loss of features as a matter of ethics.

If every feature of every book needs to be available on every platform at launch time, there's no way to innovate. However, there's nothing stopping authors who use iBooks Author to make textbooks for iPad from taking their content and rebuilding it for some other platform.

As I recall, iBooks e-book are exactly epub format in an encrypted, DRM wrapper. Apple is giving iBooks away free to try to build a monopoly with a nice content authoring system and lock in.

No commercial publisher will have any issue affording equivalent quality authoring tools which can export to multiple formats and storefronts. Again there is an ethical issue with the seals Apple has with publishers if those books aren't for sale on other platforms.

Apple and their fans keep using those terms, innovate and invent. Those words, I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

No, iBooks has MANY features over a standard epub, why do you think iPad textbooks can't be run on a PC yet? and no, it's not the DRM. we've been able to remove FairPlay for half a decade now.